​I watched a founder validate for 3 months. His competitor launched in 4 week. Guess who won.

I watched a founder validate for three months. Talked to 200 users. Got 180 saying “yes, I’d pay.” Still didn’t build. His reasoning? “What if those 180 are just being nice?” Meanwhile, his competitor just shipped. Rough. No validation. Just launched.

Six months later: competitor has 1000 users, 5% paying. Founder who validated? Still building because feedback was contradictory. Some wanted feature A, others wanted feature B. He was stuck.

Here’s what nobody says out loud. Validation is theater until it’s real money. When someone says “yeah I’d use this,” they’re being polite. When they actually pay you 500 rupees, they’re being honest. One is talk. The other is data.

I know a founder who did 50 customer interviews. Got amazing feedback. Shipped anyway. Bombed. Know why? People lie in interviews. They don’t lie with their wallet. Another founder did zero interviews. Just shipped because he was tired of planning. Got 200 users month one. 80% churn. But he learned more in that month than validation guy learned in three months of talking. First founder eventually hit product-market fit. Took 8 months. Second founder? Three months. The math isn’t complicated.

Validation is you asking “is this good?” and people saying “yeah sure.” Then you waste six months building based on that “yeah sure,” only to realize the market wanted something different. Real validation? Ship it. People pay or they don’t. People use it or they ghost. That’s the only data that matters.

But trap is , Your product feels rough. Your copy sucks. Your onboarding is confusing. So you keep validating instead of shipping. You’re afraid of failure. But shipping something bad and learning beats validating something okay and shipping it six months later.

Talk to 10-20 people. Get basic confirmation the problem is real. Then build. Don’t talk to 200 and create a Frankenstein product trying to be everything for everyone.

The winners validate just enough. Then ship. Then iterate on real usage. The losers validate forever. “One more round of interviews.” “Fifty more conversations.” “I need to be 100% sure.” You’ll never be 100% sure. The only sure thing is shipping and finding out. Everything else is procrastination with better marketing.

What’s your real reason for not shipping/ launching? Validation or fear?